


Coach Conversation (Or Lack Thereof)

by HermioneSpencer



Series: The Dearth Collection [2]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Absolute fluff, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 15:28:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6334366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HermioneSpencer/pseuds/HermioneSpencer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The stench of a toilet solidifies the feasibility of a set of circumstances.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coach Conversation (Or Lack Thereof)

Unfortunately for Cosima, she had been assigned the seat closest to the cramped stairs on the coach that led down to the very small toilet. It had its advantages, especially for a six hour long coach ride (easy access and no one to squeeze past), but only one hour had passed, and already Cosima knew that this was not going to be an easy ride.

 

For some reason, someone (probably that psychotic looking woman with badly dyed frizzy blonde hair) had thought that it would be perfectly acceptable to eat a burrito before getting on the coach. That may have been very pleasant for them at the time, but it had now become a serious problem for Cosima. The toilet really wasn’t that far away, and some terribly awful stench was violating the dreadlocked woman’s nose. It was merely uncomfortable, at first, and she had been able to avoid the smell by hiding her face under her bright red coat, but as is the nature of gases, the heat of the coach merely served to increase the gas’ kinetic energy, enhancing its diffusion. The stench of spicy-burrito human waste was beginning to make Cosima gag, so she had to move, and she had to move _now._ Decided, she rose from her solo seat and like a meerkat, her head turned from side to side, checking out if there were any free seats that she could nab. 

 

Of course, there were no more seats; she was on a coach to San Francisco, so it was hardly going to be empty. There was an eclectic mix of people, from excited tourists to corporate demons, but the diversity of the coach was of the least importance to Cosima. Their laughing and conversations and general human sounds were not important. She was simply desperate to save her nose. This feeling of desperation was sharpened when she caught another God-awful whiff of that toilet. There! She could see an anomaly in the spacing of the heads on the furthest side of the coach from her, right at the back by the left window; unless there was a child (or an abnormally small adult) sitting there, it had to be free. People were beginning to watch her, so she moved to look like she was doing something. 

 

Walking down the centre aisle of the coach, she approached the back, her eyes fixed on the hopefully empty seat. Too late did she realise that there was no possible way on Earth that she could sit there. The woman who occupied the seat next to it… no, Cosima couldn’t sit next to her and honestly tell herself that it was easier then dealing with some effluvium. She was about to turn around, when the woman in question looked up at her from the book she had been reading, catching her eyes. Cosima melted under her intense gaze. It was the sort of gaze one can only see in the eyes of a reader; when they are so captivated with the words that they are reading, that they seem to forget the physical world around them exists, and they retreat into the universe they hold in their hands, and when jolted back into real life, the majority of them is still there, in their fiction that is somehow larger than the world they’re in now. It was a fucking sexy gaze. The woman had blonde, curly hair, and it framed her face perfectly, and her small reading glasses served to add a whole other dimension to her face.

 

“Are you okay?” There is a place readers retreat to inside their heads, but sometimes that does not nearly compare to the lack of awareness a smitten girl enchanted by beauty, but it isn’t nearly as intelligent. In fact, it serves to make one quite stupid, which was demonstrated perfectly by the way Cosima struggled to form a response.

 

“Uh…” she was rendered dumb by this woman’s beauty. She was beginning to regret even getting on this coach, regretting making this trip home to see her parents, regretting ever even having to leave them in the first place. Every decision she had made in her life seemed to be personally responsible for leading her to this one specific moment. Which was ridiculous. But that didn’t give Cosima any words to use.

 

“ _Allo?_ Do you need something…? You look a little pale... Do you need some water..?” Cosima could tell the woman was trying to be polite, but her patience was being tested. Terrified by the thought of annoying her, she mentally slapped herself, and kick-started her brain into rebooting. Well, if she went back on her plan now, she would have embarrassed herself in front of a gorgeous woman _and_ be forced to breathe in toxic waste. 

 

“Sorry! I think I got head rush from getting up too quickly there. Um, I was wondering if it would be okay if I sat in that spare seat next to you… I’m afraid that my seat has been compromised… it was attacked by an unsavoury element of Mexican culture.” When the woman looked at her with a clearly confused look on her face, she tried to explain herself. “Shit, okay, I was trying to be all polite about it, but I think it’s just easier to be honest here. I was sitting by the toilet, but someone did some really stonky stinky business and I need to move. This is the only empty seat on the coach… do you mind if I sit here?” The blonde woman’s eyes lit up with understanding, and she began to laugh, but she was nodding all the same.

 

“ _Oui, bien sûr,_ ” she smiled brightly, “Let me just move my bag, and then I can get up and let you in.” She sorted out her belongings and Cosima took this as an opportunity to get her own small bag that had her “entertainment” for the long journey. The blonde woman was just getting up to allow her in when Cosima returned to the back of the coach. 

 

The timing of this next moment was crucial, and Cosima would never again doubt that coincidences were really just the Universe’s way of getting that small _joie de vivre_ every once in a while. Or it just wanted to laugh at people. Whatever the motives behind the events, this is what happened:

 

The Frenchwoman stood up to allow her space to get into her new seat by the window, and they were standing practically chest to chest, their height differences…heightened…by the woman’s vertical state. Cosima was squeezing into the space when the coach hit a pothole, and the flooring was stolen from under the taller woman’s long legs. She lost her balance, and in an attempt to regain her footing, she stepped into the chair’s space backwards, so that her back was against the headrest if the chair in front, but she could not find the right balance, so she fell forward. At the last moment, her hand came up to catch the window, and she was saved, but this left the two women closer than they had been before, the blonde’s lips less than 5 centimetres away from the brunette’s. 

 

There was a very long moment in which neither of them moved, but finally the blonde came to her senses and before long she had slumped back into her seat next to Cosima. Cosima could have sworn that she heard a small puff of breath escape from the blonde’s lips, but she didn’t know what it meant.

 

“So, um, you’ve been kind enough to let me sit here, but I need another favour.” The hazel eyes belonging to the blonde snapped back to hers, holding a question that she didn’t need to ask. “It’s not a bad one or anything. I just wanna know your name. I would hate to spend the next…” she glanced at her watch “4 and a half hours not knowing the name of the woman who saved me from a miasmic death.” The blonde laughed brightly, and held her hand out to Cosima.

 

“Delphine.” Cosima met her hand enthusiastically, and spoke her own name out loud. “Ooh, Cosima’s a lovely name!” Delphine’s eyes were bright with humour.

 

“Why thank you, Delphine. I got it for my birthday.” This elicited another giggle from the Frenchwoman. “I like Delphine more though. Wanna swap?” She winked at the girl, unsure as to where her confidence had sprung from. “‘Delphine’ reminds me of ‘dolphin’ but I can’t remember what the French word for that is. I studied French in high school but clearly I haven’t been there for a few years now. I’ve forgotten most of it. I think I can ask where the library is.” Delphine smiled.

 

“ _Dauphin._ You’re right, it is similar but only in spelling really. In French, pronunciation is everything.” Cosima found it funny that a Frenchwoman was talking about correct pronunciation when she was lilting away in that sexy French accent. “People claim that French pronunciation is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. French gets a lot of stick for being hard, but nobody seems to notice how difficult a language English is to learn.”

 

“Well I suppose that that viewpoint can be taken for any language. Granted, English is hard semantically, but the difficulty in French is in having enough phlegm in your throat to make the ‘r’ sounds. When you’re a healthy gal like me, it’s just not easy to sound so bunged up all the time!” Delphine could tell that Cosima was mocking her, but she put on a face of mock-outrage.

 

“You think that French people sound like they are ‘bunged up’ with phlegm?!” She gasped, turning her body completely to face Cosima. “You are very cheeky. You hardly know me and you are insulting my fellow countrymen.” This inspired a laugh from Cosima this time.

 

“I can’t deny it; I was toeing over the line there.” She winked at Delphine again, and took a moment to appreciate the sparkle in her eyes. She looked down at the book that the Frenchwoman held in her hands, the one that had captured her imagination so deeply before.

 

“Watcha readin’?”

 

“Oh, ‘Great Expectations’.”

 

“‘Great Expectations?' What’s the reasoning behind that choice, then?”

 

“Well I’m not sure, really. I’ve never read it before, and I was given it as a present a couple of years ago. I had a six hour coach trip ahead of me, so I grabbed the only unread book left on my shelf. It’s very good though. Dickens is very good, and I love his style of writing. The metaphors, the similes; they are stunning! They make me wonder how I never thought of that before, and I see the thing differently from thereon in. Oh, and the way that the settings in the books reflect the states of mind of the characters… it is inspired! Ah, here, let me read you some.” She leafed through the book, looking for a particular passage. Triumph clear on her face, she held the book up and began to read in a clear yet accented voice.

 

“‘I entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty large room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it.’” Holding up a finger, indicating that Cosima wait for a moment, her eyes skipped to further down the page. She continued. “‘It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud.’” Cosima was absolutely mesmerised. The soft rise and fall of her lilting voice was like a medicine that soothed the soul, but it paused and sped up at the perfect moments, painting an image in Cosima’s mind of Miss Havisham’s house. Cosima had read the book before, but many years ago. It felt fresh in her mind once more.

 

Delphine looked up at her, having finished reading the excerpt she wanted to share. “Do you see what I mean? Miss Havisham’s room, like herself, has lost all connection to any sort of life; there is light, but it is only artificially produced by the wax candles. And you can see that the whole room has been preserved just so, keeping it exactly how it was on the day of her wedding. The ‘standing still of all the pale decayed objects’ reflects Miss Havisham herself; she remains stuck in time, living no life at all but maintaining that sense of…expectation. Her catatonic state is not some sort of mental illness or senility, it is her coping mechanism; the moment she moves on, she has lost all hope that things will be different, all hope that her love shall return. Her Great Expectation that it shall all be okay again, one day.”

 

“Oh my God, Delphine. Wow, you like Dickens, huh? Your eyes when you spoke about that… you really are _fascinated!_ I love seeing passion in people. It’s refreshing.” Cosima was beaming at Delphine, amazed that someone could be so excited.

 

“I am a great lover of words, and one can see that Dickens also was. There are words in here I never could have imagined existed! One of the things I love most about English is the sheer number of words there are to describe one thing, and their marginal yet all important differences. Let me see… Take, for example… _oui, glaciale._ ‘Glaciale’ in French means… icy, freezing, frosty, and one word I found recently, archaic I think; ‘gelid’. We have one word for something you have at least four for.” Her nose wrinkled adorably and Cosima’s stomach flipped. “The same goes for ‘fraisfraîche’ too; that means cool, crisp _and_ Britain’s very funny word, ‘nippy’. And yet, they all mean something so different! A cool day is a day in which you might wear a sleeveless top and need a cardigan in your bag just in case, but on a _crisp_ day, you would definitely need to be wearing that cardigan, but if you are wearing a sleeveless top on a _nippy_ day then you are simply a fool. You would need a vest on for sure, I think. In French we have only one word for three different outfit requirements.”

 

Cosima laughed out loud, and her tongue poked out between her teeth.

 

“That was absolutely too cute. Can you say it all again so that I can record it and never forget it?”

 

“You are such a brat! Do not mock me so.”

 

Cosima paused. She _wasn’t_ mocking Delphine at this moment in time. She really _did_ want to be able to hear Delphine’s dissection of the English language every day. She wanted to know _everything_ that went on in the blonde’s head; what her opinions on global warming and toast were, what she thought of the radio and what her favourite stories were.  
With this realisation hitting her, she realised that Delphine was looking deeply into her eyes. Cosima felt as if she were reading her thoughts, because they both simultaneously leaned their heads towards each other. With surprisingly little hesitation on either side, their lips met halfway, and it was a kiss filled with more words than either of them could have supplied with the help of any thesauri.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Reader,
> 
> I promise you, patience is a virtue and you shall be rewarded in due time! I think they are getting slightly more sordid with each one I'm writing...
> 
> HermioneSpencer


End file.
